The Avengers starts coming together
Jun. 3rd, 2010 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenETA: Someone found a much better source costume for Thor. Why couldn't they have gone with that? Also, I realize that part of what's been bugging me is that with the facial hair he's got and the long blonde hair, movie-Thor looks a lot like psycho-harpoon-hand-Aquaman. 'S weird!
The concept art is out for film versions of Captain America and Thor. Like the Cap, am suddenly less confident about Thor than I was previously. To be fair, concept art that incorporates the look of a real human being is always going to look a bit weird, and the only reason that the design for the Cap doesn't look as horrible as the art for Thor is because most of his features are covered. (Thor lets it all hang out, baby.)
Still, Thor looks all kinds of ridiculous despite the fact that virtually the same aesthetic dominates these two costumes. This is because of the illogical nature of Thor in the first place, I suspect. Captain America can wear what we're now used to considering comic book-combat chic. Basically, it's fine for him to look like he's got an amalgam of the X-Men uniforms crossed with the Batsuit. He's a soldier, that's what we've decided comic soldiers wear when they're made into live-action people.
But Thor is a goddamned, well, god. If ever there were an excuse for impracticality or theatricality, hey, this is it. Let's get him into some plate mail or quilted outerwear! I know, I know, it doesn't fit into what Marvel has planned for The Avengers movie--but neither does Thor! I mean, you quite literally cannot make him make sense. You can hand-wave away Iron Man as part of Tony Stark's genius, and I think we've proven that the general public is too stupid to know what you can and can't do with DNA, so that covers just about every other Avenger there is (the mutants, the spider-bitten, the Hulk). But not Thor. He's a god, so your attempts to make him real are either irrelevant or stupid. Guess which one I'm leaning towards?
The concept art is out for film versions of Captain America and Thor. Like the Cap, am suddenly less confident about Thor than I was previously. To be fair, concept art that incorporates the look of a real human being is always going to look a bit weird, and the only reason that the design for the Cap doesn't look as horrible as the art for Thor is because most of his features are covered. (Thor lets it all hang out, baby.)
Still, Thor looks all kinds of ridiculous despite the fact that virtually the same aesthetic dominates these two costumes. This is because of the illogical nature of Thor in the first place, I suspect. Captain America can wear what we're now used to considering comic book-combat chic. Basically, it's fine for him to look like he's got an amalgam of the X-Men uniforms crossed with the Batsuit. He's a soldier, that's what we've decided comic soldiers wear when they're made into live-action people.
But Thor is a goddamned, well, god. If ever there were an excuse for impracticality or theatricality, hey, this is it. Let's get him into some plate mail or quilted outerwear! I know, I know, it doesn't fit into what Marvel has planned for The Avengers movie--but neither does Thor! I mean, you quite literally cannot make him make sense. You can hand-wave away Iron Man as part of Tony Stark's genius, and I think we've proven that the general public is too stupid to know what you can and can't do with DNA, so that covers just about every other Avenger there is (the mutants, the spider-bitten, the Hulk). But not Thor. He's a god, so your attempts to make him real are either irrelevant or stupid. Guess which one I'm leaning towards?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 06:31 pm (UTC)The important part of this defense of the general public is that you mention radioactive spiders, not the "genetically-enhanced super spiders" that were used to hand-wave away the spider powers in the movies. Of course the public doesn't believe radioactive spiders will give anybody super powers or create giant atomic monsters. That was the fear of the 1950s/60s when radioactivity was at its least understood. Now that we know better, we scoff at such nonsense...
...while setting up our heroes to be mutants and genetically-enhanced soldiers using different methods that we don't fully understand the repercussions of now. That's all the difference is. I could buy that most people understand that DNA doesn't work the way they say it does in movies, least of all superhero movies. But that doesn't mean that they don't still, sort of, believe that lurking beneath the hyperbole is something almost as transformative. So super-strength, the ability wall-crawl, okay, we're not that dumb. But what about something like Splice, where we can pipette in some human DNA and transform a hybrid animal into one that is sentient and human-looking? Well, that guy did just make self-replicating synthetic life....
Perhaps the public gets it, but the writers don't, that's for sure.